Field of Art
This disclosure generally relates to the field of providing advertisements in media content. Specifically, this disclosure is directed towards providing advertisements in videos via ad tagging to devices that typically operate for a period of time offline.
Description of the Related Art
Online sharing of video content has developed into a world-wide phenomenon, supported by dozens of websites. On average, many thousands of videos are posted every day, and this number is increasing as the tools and opportunities for capturing video become easier to use and more widespread. Shared video content provides good opportunities to present advertising material to viewers along with the requested video content. Such advertisements can generate revenue for content distributers, the video content publishers, or both.
When content distributers deliver video content to users in a web browser, the content distributers control the majority of the logic and the user interface for video playback. Conventional content distributers insert advertisements by using their own custom video player which is instructed to retrieve specific advertisements and insert the advertisements at specific times in the video content. Additionally, conventional content distributers can optionally embed advertisements directly into the video stream which eliminates the need to control the custom video player.
The control afforded to the content distributers allows for flexibility in advertisement insertion as the content distributers can select and display a new advertisement at each advertising opportunity within the content and have strict control over reporting of user viewing of advertisements for monetization purposes. Furthermore, the content distributers can support a wide variety of advertisement formats such as in-stream video advertisements, advertisement overlays (e.g., text, image and video overlays) as well as user interactive advertisements.
When videos are delivered to third party devices such as portable media players or television set top boxes, these devices typically do not support technologies that allow a content distributer tight control over the logic and user interface for video playback. Thus, content distributers do not know whether advertisements embedded within videos were viewed by users during video playback because of the lack of control. Additionally, third party devices typically are not configured to report user viewing of advertisements to the content distributers, which further compounds the problem faced by content distributers regarding advertisement viewing. Consequently, in environments where devices operate for a period of time offline, content providers cannot accurately control advertisement distribution and fail to fairly distribute payment for advertisement viewing due to the inconsistent reporting of user viewing of advertisements from varying devices.